ScottL

• ScottL 28 Jul 2015 1:53 UTC

  7 points

  on: Open Thread, Jul. 27 - Aug 02, 2015

  Has any one been working on the basics of rationality or summarizing the sequences? I think it would be helpful if someone created a sequence in which they cover the less wrong core concepts concisely as well as providing practical advice on how to apply rationality skills related to these concepts at the 5 second level.

  A useful format for the posts might be: overview of concept, example in which people frequently fail at being rational because they innately don’t follow the concept and then advice on how to apply the concept. Or another format might be: principle underlying multiple less wrong concepts, examples in which people fail at being rational because they don’t follow the concepts and then advice on how to deal with the principle and become more rational.

  I think that all these posts should summed up with or contain pratical methods on how to improve rationality skills and ways to quantify and measure these improvements. The results of CFAR workshops could probably provide a basis for these methods.

  Lots of links to the related less wrong posts or wikis would also be useful.

• ScottL 28 Jul 2015 3:28 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Open Thread, Jul. 27 - Aug 02, 2015

  I assume you mean Rationality: From AI to Zombies. I have read this. I think that the wiki is brilliant for: concise definitions of the concepts, hosting the links to all of the related posts and storing reference data like the meanings of acronyms. I guess I am more looking for something that would work as an introduction for less wrong newbies, a refresher of the main concepts for less wrong veterans and a guideline or best practices document which will explain methods that can be used to apply the core less wrong concepts. These methods should preferrably have been verified to be useful in some way.

  I suppose I could write summaries/​new explanations, but I have the following problems with this:

  • I am sure that there are other people on this site who could do a much better job at this than I can

  • I don’t have any practical experience teaching these concepts to others

  • I don’t have access to data on what methods have worked in teaching these concepts to others

• ScottL 5 Aug 2015 2:40 UTC

  25 points

  0

  on: Which LW /​ ra­tio­nal­ist blog posts aren’t cov­ered by my books & courses?

  That’s actually a tough question because Elizer/​others tend to use new names for existing ideas. For example, ‘the fallacy of the grey’ instead of ‘the continuum fallacy’, so I am not entirely sure what concepts have been covered elsewhere. Also, I think a lot of the value from less wrong posts comes from them getting you to think about an idea that you may not otherwise have thought to look deeply into even though technically it may have been in the books you have read. For example, I would never have looked into kent berridges work on wanting and liking if I hadn’t read luke prog’s post on it.

  The below list contains some of the concepts that I don’t think are covered elsewhere. You can also go through the wikis since you should know what topics you have already learnt:

  • Friendly artificial intelligence – is a superintelligence (i.e., a really powerful optimization process) that produces good, beneficial outcomes rather than harmful ones.

  • Decision Theories – Theories invented by researchers associated with MIRI and LW: TDT, Timeless Decision Theory, UDT, Updateless Decision Theory and ADT: Ambient Decision Theory (a variant of UDT)

  • Affective death spiral—positive attributes of a theory, person, or organization combine with the Halo effect in a feedback loop, resulting in the subject of the affective death spiral being held in higher and higher regard.

  • Chronophone – is a parable that is meant to convey the idea that it’s really hard to get somewhere when you don’t already know your destination. If there were some simple cognitive policy you could follow to spark moral and technological revolutions, without your home culture having advance knowledge of the destination, you could execute that cognitive policy today.

  • Free will (explanation) - means our algorithm’s ability to determine our actions. People often get confused over free will because they picture themselves as being restrained rather than part of physics. Yudowsky calls this view Requiredism, but most people just view this essentially as Compatibilism.

  • Politics is the Mind-Killer – Politics is not a good area for rational debate. It is often about status and power plays where arguments are soldiers rather than tools to get closer to the truth.

  • The map is not the territory – the idea that our perception of the world is being generated by our brain and can be considered as a ‘map’ of reality written in neural patterns. Reality exists outside our mind but we can construct models of this ‘territory’ based on what we glimpse through our senses.

  • Probability is in the Mind—Probabilities express uncertainty, and it is only agents who can be uncertain. A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory. Ignorance is in the mind.

  • Adaptation executors—Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers. Our taste buds do not find lettuce delicious and cheeseburgers distasteful once we are fed a diet too high in calories and too low in micronutrients. Tastebuds are adapted to an ancestral environment in which calories, not micronutrients, were the limiting factor. Evolution operates on too slow a timescale to re-adapt to adapt to a new conditions (such as a diet).

  • Cached thought – is an answer that was arrived at by recalling a previously-computed conclusion, rather than performing the reasoning from scratch.

  • Applause light—is an empty statement which evokes positive affect without providing new information

  • Belief as attire – is a example of an improper belief promoted by identification with a group or other signaling concerns, not by how well it reflects the territory.

  • Belief as cheering—People can bind themselves as a group by believing “crazy” things together. Then among outsiders they could show the same pride in their crazy belief as they would show wearing “crazy” group clothes among outsiders. The belief is more like a banner saying “GO BLUES”. It isn’t a statement of fact, or an attempt to persuade; it doesn’t have to be convincing—it’s a cheer.

  • Belief in belief I believe this is dennet’s idea—Where it is difficult to believe a thing, it is often much easier to believe that you ought to believe it. Were you to really believe and not just believe in belief, the consequences of error would be much more severe. When someone makes up excuses in advance, it would seem to require that belief, and belief in belief, have become unsynchronized.

  • Counter man syndrome—wherein a person behind a counter comes to believe that they know things they don’t know, because, after all, they’re the person behind the counter. So they can’t just answer a question with “I don’t know”… and thus they make something up, without really paying attention to the fact that they’re making it up. Pretty soon, they don’t know the difference between the facts and their made up stories

  • Crisis of faith—a combined technique for recognizing and eradicating the whole systems of mutually-supporting false beliefs. The technique involves systematic application of introspection, with the express intent to check the reliability of beliefs independently of the other beliefs that support them in the mind. The technique might be useful for the victims of affective death spirals, or any other systematic confusions, especially those supported by anti-epistemology.

  • Making Beliefs Pay Rent—Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the centre of the inquiry. Every guess of belief should begin by flowing to a specific guess of anticipation, and should continue to pay rent in future anticipations. If a belief turns deadbeat, evict it.

  • Least convenient possible world – is a technique for enforcing intellectual honesty, to be used when arguing against an idea. The essence of the technique is to assume that all the specific details will align with the idea against which you are arguing, i.e. to consider the idea in the context of a least convenient possible world, where every circumstance is colluding against your objections and counterarguments. This approach ensures that your objections are strong enough, running minimal risk of being rationalizations for your position.

  • Rationalist taboo—a technique for fighting muddles in discussions. By prohibiting the use of a certain word and all the words synonymous to it, people are forced to elucidate the specific contextual meaning they want to express, thus removing ambiguity otherwise present in a single word. Mainstream philosophy has a parallel procedure called “unpacking” where doubtful terms need to be expanded out.

  • Semantic stopsign – is a meaningless generic explanation that creates an illusion of giving an answer, without actually explaining anything.

• ScottL 5 Aug 2015 2:41 UTC

  17 points

  0

  in reply to: ScottL’s comment on: Which LW /​ ra­tio­nal­ist blog posts aren’t cov­ered by my books & courses?

  Some more:

  • Shut up and multiply- the ability to trust the math even when it feels wrong

  • Most of science is actually done by induction—To come up with something worth testing, a scientist needs to do lots of sound induction first or borrow an idea from someone who already used induction. This is because induction is the only way to reliably find candidate hypotheses which deserve attention. Examples of bad ways to find hypotheses include finding something interesting or surprising to believe in and then pinning all your hopes on that thing turning out to be true.

  • Twelve virtues of rationality

    • Curiosity – the burning itch

    • Relenquishment – “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” -P. C. Hodgell

    • Lightness – follow the evidence wherever it leads

    • Evenness – resist selective skepticism; use reason, not rationalization

    • Argument – do not avoid arguing; strive for exact honesty; fairness does not mean balancing yourself evenly between propositions

    • Empiricism – knowledge is rooted in empiricism and its fruit is prediction; argue what experiences to anticipate, not which beliefs to profess

    • Simplicity – is virtuous in belief, design, planning, and justification; ideally: nothing left to take away, not nothing left to add

    • Humility – take actions, anticipate errors; do not boast of modesty; no one achieves perfection

    • Perfectionism – seek the answer that is perfectly right – do not settle for less

    • Precision – the narrowest statements slice deepest; don’t walk but dance to the truth

    • Scholarship – absorb the powers of science

    • [The void] (the nameless virtue) – “More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.”

  • Oops—Theories must be bold and expose themselves to falsification; be willing to commit the heroic sacrifice of giving up your own ideas when confronted with contrary evidence; play nice in your arguments; try not to deceive yourself; and other fuzzy verbalisms. It is better to say oops quickly when you realize a mistake. The alternative is stretching out the battle with yourself over years.

  • Explaining vs. explaining away – Explaining something does not subtract from its beauty. It in fact heightens it. Through understanding it, you gain greater awareness of it. Through understanding it, you are more likely to notice its similarities and interrelationships with others things. Through understanding it, you become able to see it not only on one level, but on multiple. In regards to the delusions which people are emotionally attached to, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

  • Ugh field—Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have. We call it an “ugh field”. The ugh field forms a self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization.

  • Privileging the question—questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. Examples are: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed? The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like “should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?” and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.

  • Something to protect—The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.

  • Take joy in the merely real – If you believe that science coming to know about something places it into the dull catalogue of common things, then you’re going to be disappointed in pretty much everything eventually —either it will turn out not to exist, or even worse, it will turn out to be real. Another way to think about it is that if the magical and mythical were common place they would be merely real. If dragons were common, but zebras were a rare legendary creature then there’s a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed.

  • Complexity of value—the thesis that human values have high Kolmogorov complexity and so cannot be summed up or compressed into a few simple rules. It includes the idea of fragility of value which is the thesis that losing even a small part of the rules that make up our values could lead to results that most of us would now consider as unacceptable.

  • Egan’s law—“It all adds up to normality.” — Greg Egan. The purpose of a theory is to add up to observed reality, rather than something else. Science sets out to answer the question “What adds up to normality?” and the answer turns out to be Quantum mechanics adds up to normality. A weaker extension of this principle applies to ethical and meta-ethical debates, which generally ought to end up explaining why you shouldn’t eat babies, rather than why you should.

  • Emotion—Contrary to the stereotype, rationality doesn’t mean denying emotion. When emotion is appropriate to the reality of the situation, it should be embraced; only when emotion isn’t appropriate should it be suppressed.

  • Litany of Gendlin – “What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.” —Eugene Gendlin

  • Litany of Tarski – “If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want. “ —The Meditation on Curiosity

  • Magic—What seems to humans like a simple explanation, sometimes isn’t at all. In our own naturalistic, reductionist universe, there is always a simpler explanation. Any complicated thing that happens, happens because there is some physical mechanism behind it, even if you don’t know the mechanism yourself (which is most of the time). There is no magic.

  • Words can be wrong – There are many ways that words can be wrong it is for this reason that we should avoid arguing by definition. Instead, to facilitate communication we can taboo and reduce: we can replace the symbol with the substance and talk about facts and anticipations, not definitions.

• ScottL 13 Aug 2015 5:45 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: passive_fist’s comment on: Ideas on growth of the community

  In regards to the article, the idea of subsections or seperations of topics has already been raised in this post. I personally think it would make more sense to be able to create personal sections based on query results. So, it would just be a saved search query. It would be a section that you can name that would be shown only to you and would run a search when you enter it. The search would just be a normal search that you can run now.

  Some ideas I have had on improving the site are:

  • An announcements sub-section. One reason for why less people might be coming to the site is that the Main is clogged up with Meetup announcements.

  • Optional comment when liking or disliking. The like/​dislike status is useful with helping to sort posts in terms of quality, but it doesn’t really help improve existing posts. If your post, gets disliked, then most of the time you don’t know why it was disliked. If your post was disliked with a comment, then you could spend effort to fix the post, reply to the comment and then the disliker would hopefully reneg the dislike. This would lead to you wanting to improve posts once they have been created. The comment would only be sent to article creator.

  • Section with post karma that does not affect your personal karma. This would help with new members who start posting lower quality posts and then give up because their user has poor karma. I think your ability to post in discussion or main should be based on the post and comment karma. This means that posts in the section without personal karma would, if liked enough, allow you to post in main.

  In regards to the above comment, this is what I think of your points:

  • The barriers to entry (reading the sequences, reading the ‘seminal’ comment threads, etc.) are too high for most people—I agree. This is why I have started writing a rationality primer. I will post an article with more details on this maybe next week.

  • There is only so much ‘low-hanging fruit’ lying around. In terms of general rationality—while this is true, I think that there is still alot of area that could be covered in terms of applied general rationality. By this I mean practical advice. This also doesn’t require expert domain knowledge. You just need to go out and actually try something. I think that less wrong can improve in this area.

  • I like AI because at least it offers the possibility for new material to arise every once in a while—I think that there is alot of content that is tangentially related to rationality that could be extremely helpful. Once again, I think a more practical focus would get people thinking in more divergent directions. Personally, I plan to write some sequences around the idea of strategy it would touch on Mental models, Complexity theory, Systems dynamics, Boydian thinking and maybe some other stuff .

Less Wrong EBook Creator

• ScottL 14 Aug 2015 1:12 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: mrexpresso’s comment on: Less Wrong EBook Creator

  Thanks for the suggestion. I added the GNU public licence v3.

• ScottL 14 Aug 2015 8:07 UTC

  16 points

  on: Poli­tics: an un­der­val­ued op­por­tu­nity to change the world?

  I am not into politics at all, but I think if you could change the following it would improve the political process. Currently politics seems to be based on arguing your position and gaining status for your team rather than seeking truth and the best policy.

  • Politics is the Mind-Killer – Politics is not a good area for rational debate. It is often about status and power plays where arguments are soldiers rather than tools to get closer to the truth.

  • Adversarial process—a form of truth-seeking or conflict resolution in which identifiable factions hold one-sided positions.

  • Color politics—the words “Blues” and “Greens” are often used to refer to two opposing political factions. Politics commonly involves an adversarial process, where factions usually identify with political positions, and use arguments as soldiers to defend their side. The dichotomies presented by the opposing sides are often false dilemmas, which can be shown by presenting third options.

  • Arguments as soldiers – is a problematic scenario where arguments are treated like war or battle. Arguments get treated as soldiers, weapons to be used to defend your side of the debate, and to attack the other side. They are no longer instruments of the truth.

  A democracy is only as strong as the people that are people in it. It seems to me like politicians too often dwell on inconsequential, but politically important issues. They do this because voters care about these issues. The thing is, though, that voters are most often laymen. They are not experts. Therefore, I find it worrisome that politicians seem to discuss and change policies in order to placate voters. Obviously the opinions of voters should still matter, but when it comes to where politicians spend their effort and time. This should be based on what will provide the most benefit. I see two ways to overcome this: somehow get the voters more informed or change the political process somehow, this is related to the first point, so that there is less showboating, sycophantism and placation to the whims of voters.

  • Privileging the question—questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. Examples are: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed? The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like “should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?” and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.

  • Error of crowds—is the idea that under some scoring rules, the average error becomes less than the error of the average, thus making the average belief tautologically worse than a belief of a random person. Compare this to the ideas of modesty argument and wisdom of the crowd. A related idea is that a popular belief is likely to be wrong because the less popular ones couldn’t maintain support if they were worse than the popular one.

  • Most peoples’ beliefs aren’t worth considering—Sturgeon’s Law says that as a general rule, 90% of everything is garbage. Even if it is the case that 90% of everything produced by any field is garbage that does not mean one can dismiss the 10% that is quality work. Instead, it is important engage with that 10%, and use that as the standard of quality.

  Politicians need to become more aware of complexity and the feedback caused by their policies. Understanding system dynamics would help tremendously in this regard.

  • Policy resistance—Frequently, a nonlinear feedback system will respond to a policy change in the desired manner for a short period of time, but then return to its pre-policy-change state. This occurs when the system’s feedback structure works to defeat the policy change designed to improve it.

  • Goodhart’s law—states that once a certain indicator of success is made a target of a social or economic policy, it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role. People and institutions try to achieve their explicitly stated targets in the easiest way possible, often obeying the letter of the law. This is often done in way that the designers of the law did not anticipate or want. For example, the soviet factories which when given targets on the basis of numbers of nails produced many tiny useless nails and when given targets on basis of weight produced a few giant nails.

• ScottL 15 Aug 2015 10:48 UTC

  5 points

  on: Time-Binding

  I haven’t read the book. Here are some of my thoughts on the content in the above post. These thoughts may be invalidated by other parts in the book as I haven’t read the book and this is only the first quarter summary of the book.

  According to Korzybski, the unique quality of humans is what he calls “time-binding”, described as “the capacity of an individual or a generation to begin where the former left off”.

  Robert sussman here posits that there are three human behavioural traits not found in chimps or any other animal; they are unique and exemplify what it means to be human.

  • Symbolic behaviour—the ability to create alternative worlds, to ponder about the past and future, to imagine things that don’t exist.

  • Language—the unique communicative venue that enables humans to communicate not only in proximate contexts, but also about the past, the future, and things distant and imagined, allowing us to share and pass our symbols to future generations.

  • Culture—the ability found only in humans for different populations to create their own shared symbolic worlds and pass them on. Although chimpanzees can pass on learned behaviour, they cannot pass on shared and different world views.

  Time binding seems to be the same as culture.

  But religion is a ‘primitive science’

  Aren’t religion and science disparate concepts? I get that they both provide theories about how the world is, but to refer to religion as scientific in any way seems strange to me.

  Manhood of Humanityis: “What is a human?” Answering this question correctly could help us design a civilization allowing the fullest human development. Failure to answer this question correctly will repeat the cycle of revolutions and wars.

  This seems to be a pre 1900 view of the world, i.e. before relativity, quantum mechanics, complexity theory etc.

  This book goes over what I mean. Below is part of the abstract that explains it.

  “Early theorists believed that in science lay the promise of certainty. Built on a foundation of fact and constructed with objective and trustworthy tools, science produced knowledge. But science has also shown us that this knowledge will always be fundamentally incomplete and that a true understanding of the world is ultimately beyond our grasp. In this thoughtful and compelling book, physicist F. David Peat examines the basic philosophic difference between the certainty that characterized the thinking of humankind through the nineteenth century and contrasts it with the startling fall of certainty in the twentieth. The nineteenth century was marked by a boundless optimism and confidence in the power of progress and technology.”

  So, I basically I disagree that knowing “what is a human” is all you need to build a utopia.

  Second, I don’t think that there is necessarily any way to set up society so that everyone is perfectly satisfied. People are both similar to each other, but divergent as well. We are individuals, but have an underlying human nature. There is no human template or certain way that things can be so that it is exactly the same for everyone and perfect for everyone as well. There is going to be conflict and this, to an extent, is necessary. Perfection like certainty may be forever elusive. There is of course underlying common patterns or human universals. I take the view that non-teleological evolution means that human nature is not immutable or timeless. Human nature does not refer to an unchanging essence. Instead, it describes what the members of humanity currently happen to be like. People have common propensities, predispositions, norms and needs and these cause a certain probability and likelihood for humans to have certain traits. Another way of putting this is that there is ‘species-typical’ behaviour, but the resultant behaviour is going to be diverse. An example is laughing. We laugh because of our biology, but what we laugh at is extraordinarily variable. The cognitive ability of human’s means that their behaviours are more diverse than other animals and that their thought patterns have a greater impact on their behaviour.

  I do believe that understanding these common patterns or human needs is extremely helpful. An example is that infants who are touched gently on a regular basis gain weight and grow at better rates than babies who lack this contact. If you are designing a society or writing a policy, then understanding these needs can be immensely helpful. Some work I have found on human needs are below:

  • Maslows ranking of needs, but I don’t think the current research backs up the order or idea or ranking.

  • Manfred Max-Neef talked about fundamental human needs

  • There’s also this book by Martin Seligman and others which classifies the character strengths and virtues Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. New York: Oxford University Press and Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Summary here:www.viacharacter.org/​www/​C...ths/​VIA-Classification#nav

  I think, though, that people intuitively know the human needs because they are human themselves. The greatest atrocities that are commited by humanity to other humans are not due to a lack of understanding of the human needs, but because certain people are excluded from being deserving of being able to meet these needs. In the past certain discriminating factors, for example, melanin in skin, religion, and patriotic allegiance have been used as indicators of bestiality, lowliness, inhumanity and other degrading qualities. In summary, I think the issue is more of a perspectival one, i.e. with people’s maps. You need to not only ask what are the fundamental human needs, but you need to also ask how you can get people to create maps that allow them to best fulfill these fundamental human needs. I am sure that there are also a multitude of other considerations that you would need to think about if you were to design a civilization that allowed the fullest human development possible.

• ScottL 16 Aug 2015 5:30 UTC

  0 points

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be explanations of something awesome

• ScottL 16 Aug 2015 6:03 UTC

  0 points

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  The youtube videos of Reid Gower which include the Feynman and Sagan series. These series are educational projects intended to promote scientific literacy.

  For example, this video from the Feynman series Beauty has some audio extracts related to the concept of beauty from the the pleasure of finding things out by feynman. The video is spliced together parts from the following: the pleasure of finding things out, Home, BBC Planet Earth, BBC Life, BBC The Grand Rift, BBC The Secret Life Of Chaos, Microcosmos, NASA, Chronos, BBC The South Pacific

• ScottL 16 Aug 2015 10:57 UTC

  7 points

  on: You Are A Brain—In­tro to LW/​Ra­tion­al­ity Con­cepts [Video & Slides]

  This is really good. I think that a summary of what the presentation covers would be useful as well. I wrote a draft one below:

  ‘You Are A Brain’ is a presentation by Liron Shapira that is tailored for a general audience and provides an introduction to some of the the core LessWrong concepts including:

  • Map and territory- the map is your brains internal representation of reality. The territory is reality. This presentation covers the importance of accuracy in your map, the idea that the map is inside of you, i.e. that it is beliefs encoded as neuron structures in the brain and that maps are inherently imperfect because:

    • You can’t see the whole territory

    • You’re computationally bounded

    • You’re biased

  • Heuristics and biases—the presentation covers the idea that due to computational limitations the brain must make use of heuristics. Heuristics are mental shortcuts which require less time and energy to use, but sometimes go awry, producing bias. This presentation explains that colour vision is an example of a heuristic. The presentation also explains that illusions reveal your heuristics.

  • You’re biased—this presentation defines biases as deviations from good map-drawing procedures. The following example biases are covered:

    • Stereotyping—You draw a map that is skewed toward what you expected to see

    • Defensiveness—You don’t fix a mistake in your map because you don’t want to admit being wrong

    • Wishful thinking—You draw whatever makes you feel good on your map

  • The map is not the territory –this presentation covers the idea that the map is not the territory. If your brother was to die, you don’t react when he dies. You only react after you understand that your brother is dead. Reality (the territory) exists outside of our mind but we construct models of the ‘territory’ based on what we glimpse through our senses.

  • Adaptation executors—this presentation covers the idea that individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers. This is done tangentially through discussing super stimulus (stimulus that misleads your desire heuristics)

  • Mind projection fallacy—this presentation talks about how ‘sexiness’ is not a property of a woman, but is instead a characteristic that you attribute to the woman. That is, sexiness is not in the territory, but is in the map.

  • Wrong Questions—A question about your map that wouldn’t make sense if you had a more accurate map.

  • Quotes:

    ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.

An overview of the men­tal model theory

• ScottL 18 Aug 2015 1:53 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: alicey’s comment on: An overview of the men­tal model theory

  Thanks for the advice. It was a mistake. I have updated it to: “Only one of the following premises is true about a particular hand of cards”.

• ScottL 18 Aug 2015 2:43 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Tyrrell_McAllister’s comment on: An overview of the men­tal model theory

  I’d guess that getting this question “correct” almost requires having been trained to parse the problem in a certain formal way — namely, purely in terms of propositional logic.

  To get the question correct you just need to consider the falsity of the premises. You don’t neccesarily have to parse the problem in a fromal way, although that would help.

  On this reading, Ace is most probable.

  Ace is not more probable. It is imposible to have an ace in the dealt hand due to the requiement that only one of the premises is true. The basic idea is that one of the premises must be false which means that an ace is impossible. It is impossible because if an ace is in the dealt hand, then this means that both premises are true which violates the requirement (Exactly one of these statements is true). I have explained this further in this post

• ScottL 18 Aug 2015 6:01 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: An overview of the men­tal model theory

  I updated the first example to one that is similar to the one above by Tyrrell_McAllister. Can you please let me know if it solves the issues you had with the original example.

Men­tal Model The­ory—Illu­sion of Pos­si­bil­ity Example

• ScottL 18 Aug 2015 7:09 UTC

  12 points

  0

  on: How to learn a new area X that you have no idea about.

  I think it would be good to put the points into subsections and then describe why each subsection is valuable. I have put some draft subsections below:

  Have growth mindset

  1. Nearly anything can be learnt or improved on. Aside from a few physical limits – i.e. being the best marathon runner is very difficult; but being a better marathon runner than you were yesterday is possible.

  Clarify what X is

  1. Make a list of what you think that X is. Break it down. Followed by what you know about X, and if possible what you think you are missing about X.

  2. Do some research to confirm that your rough definition of X is actually correct. Confirm that what you know already is true, if not – replace that existing knowledge with true things about X. Do not jump into everything yet.

  3. As you learn more about X, consider coming back to this point to confirm that these is still the original X, and not X2, or X3 etc.. (if you find you were actually looking for X2 or X3, go back over the early steps for Xn again.

  Determine if it’s worth it to lean about X

  1. Make sure your chosen X is aligned with your actual goals (are you doing it because you want to?). When you want to learn a thing; is X that thing? (Example: if you want to exercise; maybe skiing isn’t the best way to do it. Or maybe it is because you live in a snow country)

  2. Check that you want to learn X and that will be progress towards a goal (or is a terminal goal – i.e. learning to draw faces can be your terminal, or can help you to paint a person’s portrait).

  3. Get access to the best resources possible. Estimate how much resource they will take to go over (time, money) and confirm you are okay with those investments.

  Determine best practices/​common mistakes

  1. Figure out what experts in the area know (by topic area name), try to find what strategies experts in the area use to go about improving themselves. (expert people are usually a pretty good way to find things out)

  2. Find out what common mistakes are when learning X, and see if you can avoid them. (learn by other people’s mistakes where possible as it can save time)

  3. Check if someone is teaching about X. Chances are that someone is, and someone has listed what relevant things they teach about X. We live in the information age, its probably all out there. If it’s not, reconsider if you are learning the right thing. (if no learning is out there it might be hard to master without trial and error the hard way)

  4. Figure out the best resources on X. If this is taking too long; spend 10 minutes and then pick the best one so far. These can be books; people; wikipedia; website repositories; if X is actually safe – consider making a small investment and learn via trial and error. (i.e. frying an egg – the common mistakes probably won’t kill you, you could invest in 50 eggs and try several methods to do it at little cost)

  5. Consider writing to 5 experts and asking them for advice in X or in finding out about X.

  While learning X, externalise what you have learnt.

  1. Delve in; make notes as you go. If things change along the way, re-evaluate.

  2. Write out the best things you needed to learn and publish them for others. (remembering you had foundations to go on – publish these as well)

  3. Try to teach X to other people. You can be empowering their lives, and teaching is a great way to learn, also making friends in the area of X is very helpful to keep you on task and enjoying X.

  Try to apply what you learnt and find ways to improve what you have learnt

  1. try to find experiments you can conduct on yourself to confirm you are on the right track towards X. Or ways to measure yourself (measurement or testing is one of the most effective ways to learn)

Truth seek­ing as an op­ti­miza­tion process

• ScottL 19 Aug 2015 1:08 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: btrettel’s comment on: How to learn a new area X that you have no idea about.

  I have fixed it. Thanks for letting know.